In reality, the greatest defect of the sRGB color space, which is still too frequently the default color space, is that it is not able to reproduce many saturated orange/red/purple colors, which are very frequently encountered around us, e.g. in flowers, fruits and clothes.

The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

The Display P3 color space is much better than sRGB for reproducing orange/red/purple colors and now it is available even in many cheap monitors. However many monitors that can reproduce Display P3 come configured by default to use just sRGB. Such monitors should always be reconfigured to use Display P3.

Monitors that can reproduce an even greater part of the Rec. 2020 color space are obviously better than those that can do only Display P3, but such monitors with a higher color gamut are usually more expensive. The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.

This post is making me feel a bit inspired to go outside and immerse myself in the forest to take in the greens. Thanks for sharing.

Open Utilities->Screenshot.app Options->Capture/Capture Format->HEIC. Note, it changes the system screenshot default away from PNG too.

Triangles between screens may differ with tuning, but I suppose they all are limited in range. I’ve yet to experiment if this experience was a “brand experience” because I liked the TV or that the colors are indeed more intense than even some HDR/DV flat screen from the past few years.

This article was so well written that it gives a lot of energy to make this comparison for real. Absolutely masterful writing and all of the plenty examples make me want to look for colors I’ve missed out on while watching so many screens.

What the article does very well is vibrantly describe what you are missing and then post an image of it, such as a beach. Looking at that image, it falls absolutely flat compared to memories and the imagination of those places. This makes it tangible how limited screens really are.

Edit: added last paragraph

The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.

To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.

Thanks to the author

Independently from this, the names for colors are culturally determined.

The Japanese call green traffic lights as 青 "ao", blue.

Russians have different terms for different shades of blue.

> Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger.

And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade

We fake the movement of anything we're staring at, by means of tiny automatic eye movements, in order to remain able to see the thing at all.

I wonder if the inaccurate representation of colors by screens, etc, in any way underlies the distinctive color palette of many AI image generators?

I do have a question that the article doesn't seem to attempt to answer, though. The article says (paraphrased in my new understanding) that any spectra which makes the cones in your eyes react the same way will result in seeing the same colour. Do we know of any examples of this?

(Colour-blindness seems like an obvious example; I'm curious though if there are any examples of two common scenarios where it can be demonstrated that there are different spectra in each, and yet most people will see them as the same colour.)

[1] (18 minutes) https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s

- use raw format on the camera

- edit raw eg pro photo rgb

- send this to a wide gamut printer with a large set of inks to view the image

the printer would replicate the color outside the srgb space

there are such inks as cyan, light cyan, orange

Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)

It's odd he noted Apple monitiers were "better". Maybe but marginally. Many options for other platforms, like Asus Pro Arte, beat it handily. And profressional color graders use Sony BVM series (Trimaster HX / OLED) for HDR or Flanders Scientific (FSI) DM/XM series or Eizo ColorEdge CG series. You won't see a single Mac at a movie studio for movie editing or color grading.

That's screen reality. 1% evocative symbols and 99% in your head.